the anomaly

Mike Lindell lost the Republican primary for governor of Minnesota.

He lost to Lisa Demuth, the State House Speaker, by a margin that was, by most measurements, a margin. The votes were counted. The results were reported. A headline in a major publication put one specific word in quotation marks.

The word is "anomalies."

This requires context. (The context is the point of this entry.) Over the past six years, Mike Lindell has constructed what can only be called an anomaly-investigation industry. Summits. Documentaries. Researchers whose specific job is to examine election results and identify, with precision, where the numbers seem wrong. He has financed this work. He has promoted it. He has appeared, repeatedly, as its most prominent advocate. He is, by any reasonable accounting, one of the nation's foremost authorities on what an election anomaly looks like and what it means when one is found.

His team has found anomalies in the results of the Minnesota Republican primary.

I want to be precise about this. The apparatus Mike Lindell built — the methodology, the researchers, the analytical framework — is now examining the election Mike Lindell lost. The same tools he directed at other elections are pointed, as of this morning, at his own. He is both the person who invented the investigation and its current subject.

(At some point, someone ran the analysis. It is not clear whether this was a paid researcher or a volunteer who follows the work closely. What is clear is that Mike Lindell received the report and described its contents using the word he has been teaching people to use for six years. He knows what anomalies look like. He built the curriculum.)

The word appears in the headline in quotation marks, which in journalism is a signal: the reporter is not endorsing the word. The reporter is quoting someone who used it. The someone is Mike Lindell. He has, historically, not used it in quotation marks.

The investigation will reach a conclusion. If it finds anomalies, this will confirm what the apparatus was designed to find. If it does not, Mike Lindell's team will have concluded that the results were accurate, which is also the conclusion that everyone who beat him would prefer.

The word was already in his vocabulary. He did not invent it for this occasion. He invented it for other occasions, and the occasions have been building toward this one since approximately November 2020.

The investigation continues. So does the curriculum.